Q&A with Nitzan lahat, Founder – Mpcheck
What does MPCheck do?
MPCheck is a company that provides a groundbreaking technology-based service for personalized medical
Nitzan lahat, Founder – Mpcheck
testing and health screenings.
How did you come up with the idea, and what is the story behind it?
A few years ago, I lost my wife suddenly due an unexpected illness. As a result, I decided to look for a way to leverage existing advanced technologies to make routine health checks more personalized and therefore more effective.
Unfortunately, healthy people often skip important medical tests, because the process is inconvenient and takes too much time. By developing a better way, I aim to improve the patient experience of routine health screenings, to help detect disease earlier and hopefully save lives.
Who are your clients?
Our main clients are health insurance providers and organizations who offer routine health screenings to their employees.
What does the process look like from the user point of view?
The patient starts by completing a short questionnaire to build their personal medical profile. Based on this information, the system creates a health screening that includes only the tests that are relevant to their individual health status.
Then, a team arrives at the patient’s location (whether home or office) to conduct the tests, at a time convenient to the patient. The screening process is fast, using breakthrough portable lab technology enabling all the relevant tests to be conducted on the spot. This eliminates the need for the patient to waste precious time traveling to different labs and clinics.
After the health checks are complete, the results are forwarded online to the supervising physician appointed by the insurer. The patient is scheduled for a video chat with the physician who goes over the results, ensuring their accuracy, clarifying any irregularities, and approving them for the insurer. This data is then sent digitally to the insurance company, so they can properly and accurately assess the risk of the individual patient.
All of this happens online, in a fast, digital and streamlined way, making MPCheck an innovative process with significant advantages for the insurance company and its customers.
What can be the benefits for the insurance company? How does your product help insurers save money?
The entire design and execution of the process saves time, reduces risk and therefore also reduces costs for health insurance companies.
The time necessary to conduct health screenings is significantly shortened (approximately 20 minutes for a full medical screening). The operational process is also shortened because it is conducted entirely digitally, with data flowing instantly from the screening to the supervising physician to the insurance company. We are aiming to develop a fully automated system that will recommend to insurers whether or not to insure a patient based on predefined parameters, whether to gather more patient data via further tests, or to increase the premium for the individual patient. This process will be undertaken in collaboration with the relevant experts from the insurance companies.
For customers, the experience is significantly more comfortable and convenient. The screening is conducted at a time and place convenient to them, whether home or office, without the need to travel to different clinics or get prepared for different tests at different times.
How does your platform improve the insurance product?
Our system uses advanced data analysis to provide focused insights about the health of individual patients. This Business Intelligence-based approach enables insurance companies to significantly reduce risk, and to provide the most accurate and effective, cost-optimized coverage for individual patients at scale.
For the underwriting process, the insurer receives detailed patient information at high resolution, from the questionnaire answers to results from specific lab tests. This data is used to completely personalize the insurance product, whether for pricing and actuarial purposes, underwriting, or management of the lifecycle of the policy and claims management. MPCheck supports a fully tailored approach to health insurance, and a completely different and more effective mode of risk management.
Do you work directly with private customers also?
Currently, we are working with organizations and institutions, not the private market. Certain products, such as home-based HPV tests, will soon be available for the private market too.
What investments were made in the company so far?
We have invested significantly in the development of an advanced digital platform that facilitates the MPCheck process. A key advantage of the platform is that it allows us to create a tailored solution for each client concurrently with their regular operations, making the integration of MPCheck highly efficient and saving valuable resources for insurance companies.
We also invest resources in finding ways to optimize health data and in identifying breakthrough technologies that will enable us to provide the best and most advanced service to our clientele in the future.
Tell me about your professional background and about other key figures in the company.
Before founding MPCheck, I was the Innovation Leader and VP of Technology at one of Israel’s leading health groups. I hold an MBA and have extensive experience in health tech.
The MPCheck advisory board includes two key figures from Israel’s national health system: Dr Yitzchak Berlowitz, former Deputy Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Health, and Professor Avi Porath, former Medical Director of Maccabi Health Services.
What do you think about spreading abroad?
Our goal is to take the MPCheck process and system abroad where it will be a game changer. The successful pilot programs conducted in Israel, which is a small-sized country, prove that the MPCheck process will be even more significant in larger countries where the distances between patients and insurers are much bigger. Expanding globally will enable us to leverage digital health data among a much larger population, and this will be a key driver in our BI efforts.
Tell me about your business collaborations that have been made so far?
We are consulting with reinsurer Swiss Re Israel about how to build out our operational processes, improve their efficacy, and how MPCheck can be integrated by insurers to support smoother, faster underwriting.
With the help of Swiss Re, we developed a smart digital health declaration that enables us to analyze and summarize the patient data in the most effective way, shorten the process for the patient and insurance company, and also improve the process between insurance companies and reinsurers.
We are currently completing a successful pilot with an insurance company for the underwriting process, with excellent results. We reduced the average processing time from weeks to a few days, and achieved high satisfaction from patients, insurance agents and insurance companies alike. 86% of insured patients preferred the MPCheck process over the standard health screening.
In light of this success, we will soon begin working with more insurance companies.
